History 101

I live in a land void of culture. Honestly, I think that I started out to be a really interesting and intellectual person who examined things and had the potential to form her own opinions without the aid of others. I also think the person I started out to be got lost along the way, stifled by the superficial, nonsensical, and bizarre country folk syndrome that runs rampant in the highways and byways where I grew up.



I learned to read when I was about 4 because my older brother had so much trouble with it that my parents actually worked with him at home on it and it came naturally to me once I was introduced. For the next several years I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I read all my brothers reading booksand all my reading books. Then I started rummaging my grandmother's book shelves and read all of her Reader's Digest and the romance novels. I also raided my babysitters book shelves the summer before second grade because she was old and boring and watched nothing but soap operas. She had the whole series of Nancy Drew and the Hardee Boys. Before the summer was through, I was back down to Reader's Digest again. I guess it never occured to me to actually ask my parents to buy me books or take me to the public library. I never saw either of my parents read a book until I was in the sixth grade or so when my dad got into reading sci-fi books.



When school started my second grade year I had this awesome teacher named Mrs Kearn who read us the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and the Helen Keller books. I loved them and spent the rest of the year trying to find more book series to read. My best friend at the time (and the only person around with whom I could have a converstion that was about thinking or reading) was getting into Trixie Belden; so I read those too.



As you can tell, I really got down to the nitty-gritty reading by 3rd grade. I fell in love with Edgar Allen Poe after reading his poem "The Raven" in my brother's reading book. So I tried getting those from the library at school only to find that they were not in the library that I was allowed to use. I manged to get my brother to get some for me and I read those. By the end of that year I had read most of the classic junior high required reading lists. I took a break from the heavy stuff and followed the babysitter's club for awhile.



My friend and I had toyed with writing some poetry and thought it was just awesome so we read some of that together and talked about it, we also talked about what we were studying in school. I think at first the long discussions about what were reading in history books were just an effort to get rid of her eavesdropping little brothers, but we found something satisfying in it. We read Gone with The Wind together in sixth grade, and then decided to write our own epic saga. I cannot say what all it was about because it too emberassing, but it was a great time and the project spanned two years or more. I wish I still had the manuscript. We had 3 of those manilla bradded folders full of it. I kept it until about high school and then read it on a whim one day, found it to be emberassing and burned it.



Back to my comment about forgetting who I was. My friend decided one day that she was going to be in the "in" crowd and made conscious effort to fit in. She did not mean to leave me behind, but I could not see myself joining sports or dressing in the little girl clothes that the popular girls wore. They were all known for being smart, but I knew smart was not a grade, and I found their conversations to be dry and gossip driven. I trekked on alone.



I felt deeply betrayed by my one true friend and failed in making another best friend for years. Before her I was a loaner and after her I was also a bit of a loaner. I did find that if I wanted to talk about anything besides hair and boys that I could talk to the boys. They were full of theory and jive talk at that age, but I liked that so I chatted them up for awhile as well as played baseball with them in the neighborhood. This only suceeded in further alienating me from the other girls who were just discovering what boys were for. YAY ME!



I got to be the first one they called flirt and tease and all those good names that jealous girls like to throw about. So I withdrew. More books, more efforts at writing short stories and poetry. Still, no one to talk to. I did make a couple of friends my seventh grade year who I could have deep conversations with, two of them moved away, and the third was someone I was not able to commit to making a connection with yet and he eventually disappeared only to resurface years and years later and almost too late night I add.



Sometimes I long to have my old first friend back. We spent so many hours weaving dreams together and I tried many times to get our old friendship back but even though she left the efforts for popularity by the wayside, that's where I reamained as well.



So why am I up writing this (rather poorly too I might add) blog about the past. Because it sometimes haunts me. The person I failed to make the connection with all those years ago is very much a part of my life now and it chills me to the bone to think about how he could have been there for me all this time. How different life might have been.



Also in the department of how different it could have been. If I had not grown up in a hick town where not knowing any better was an ok excuse, and they were running "blacks" out of town with torches a good thirty years after segregation, I would have joined the Peace Corp but I thought it was not for real people, just another of my fairy tails.
There were so many dreams that I thought were not real because I read them in books but did not see anyone around me doing it. WOW! I need to get out of here.